<scp>WPA</scp> educational initiatives: reaching different stakeholders in the mental health field
Authors: Roger M.K. Ng
Journal: World Psychiatry (2022)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a major restriction in access to face-to-face educational opportunities1. Mental health professionals working in underserved regions have suffered greatly, as expertise in mental health field is mostly concentrated in high-income countries. Yet, the WPA has been able to set up an education portal in its website, and to launch a variety of educational activities including live webinars, recorded webinars, and educational courses2-6. We have now more than twenty recorded webinars, covering a diverse range of topics, from mental health prevention to early intervention, psychiatric rehabilitation and recovery services. In the education portal, there are mental health resources in eighteen different languages, which are visited by professionals from many countries across the world. Apart from the education portal, the WPA website also provides updated mental health resources in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and to supporting mental health professionals working for people adversely affected by the war in Ukraine. Moving ahead, there will be regular live webinars once a month on a range of mental health topics, with the support from experts of WPA Scientific Sections. There will also be live webinars delivered by service users and carers, in collaboration with the WPA Advisory Group of Service Users and Carers7. Such webinars will provide fresh insight to the participants about how users and carers can play a significant role in the design, delivery and evaluation of mental health services even in resource-constrain­ed regions around the globe. While educational resources and live we­binars available in the WPA education portal address the knowledge needs of vari­ous stakeholders, they cannot meet the re­quirements of skills transfer and acquisition among mental health professionals. To target this area, the WPA Workgroup on Volunteering has conducted two pilot projects in Mexico and Pakistan8. These two projects have provided enormous insight about the way forward with volunteering in terms of skill transfer and acquisition in a culturally sensitive and relevant manner. There were high levels of satisfaction among the expert volunteering trainers and the trainees from both host­ing countries. For the second pilot project, the local expert trainers were also involved, and the expert volunteers were able to build up trust and long-lasting relationships with them to collaborate in developing a local train­ing programme for psychiatric trainees in child and adolescent psychiatry. Such training can pave the way forward for the future set-up of national child and adolescent mental health services across Pakistan. The Workgroup has now opened the ap­plication for further projects to all WPA Member Societies and would expect to provide more volunteering experiences from different countries as well. It is the aspiration of the Workgroup that additional Member Societies from other continents such as Africa, South America and Europe will be able to participate in this programme. While the WPA has developed new strat­egies to disseminate mental health knowledge and skills to various stakeholders, it is also important for the Association to understand the training needs of the various Member Societies, so that more proactive and in-reach efforts can be made to support those countries in need of more extensive and systematic educational support. A WPA global survey on the training landscape of psychiatrists has been conducted in 2019/2020 with the aim to depict a comprehensive profile of training levels and experiences of psychiatrists around the world9, 10. This is providing valuable guidance to the WPA about focusing its resources and effort to support those countries with most pressing shortage of training for their psychiatrists. Upon the conclusion of the first phase of this survey, the WPA has received responses from most of the Member Societies with a large number of psychiatrists, so that the results have been representative of the current training profiles of countries with good mental health resources. Yet, the limited responses from regions with underserved populations have led the Association to planning for a second phase of the survey. In order to encourage respons­es from Member Societies of these latter regions, we will send them e-mail requests along with the report of the first phase of the survey. It is hoped that this will arouse their interests in contributing their local training data, so that the final survey report can come up with a more representative training landscape of psychiatrists around the globe. Last but not least, the WPA is acutely aware that some educational resources available in the education portal or used in volunteering projects might not be culturally appropriate and relevant, given that most of them were developed in the Western world with relatively more mental health resources. We now endeavour to work with a range of WPA Scientific Sections to develop new guidelines on various mental health disorders with particular attention to the needs of low- and middle-income coun­tries. Indeed, in the WPA survey of training needs of psychiatrists around the globe, there have been comments from respondents that more culturally relevant and appropriate training resources in the form of books, videos, workshops and webinars would need to be developed to cater for professionals working in low- and middle-income countries11. For example, most national guidelines on treatment of psychoses were developed in Western countries and have been used as educational resources for mental health professionals across the globe. Many medications available in Western countries might not be available in countries with limited mental health resources. A truly international guideline should take into account cultural differences in resources, clinical presentations, relevant and acceptable treatments, and prognoses12. The period covered by the current WPA Action Plan3-5 will end in 2023. It is our aspiration that the above educational initiatives bring about some positive changes in global psychiatric education before this term ends. All interested readers are welcome to send us their comments and feedback.